New Blog Post from Morris

My New Blog Post
All of the educated and well-informed members of every major religion today know that their own religion is not unique. During the late nineteenth century thinkers like William James and his The Varieties of Religious Experiences, and Rudolf Ottos, Das Heilige or The Holy both demonstrated that experiences of awe, wonder, fear and/or overwhelming ecstasy appear to individuals in every society and they have been traditionally interpreted within the framework of the own religious faith and their own societies own understanding of the natural as well as of the supernatural or transcendent state of the universe. Such pioneering books appeared almost simultaneously with more social scientific and much more universal analyses of the religions of the world like Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary forms of Religious Life. Durkheim gave an exhaustive description of rites of tribes that were both manifestations of the social oneness of the tribe itself and simultaneously very religious. He analyzed the different types of religion from transcendent “mana,” or power, to the “soul” of humans as distinct from their body, to the other “spirits” independent of human beings, to totemism. He saw these as forms of “animism” and traced their origins to the immense “effervescence” brought on by tribal dancing, drumming chanting and the like that created a very different state of consciousness filled with magic. He did not conclude that all these things were in fact authentic manifestations supernatural world. Being a contemporary of Freud, he simply offered monumental description of the universality and the variety of religion in every society. His new opening up of the religious world led soon to masters of comparative religion like Mirea Eliade and his The Sacred and the Profane in 1954 and his Patterns in Comparative Religion in the 1958. These were followed soon by Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Clifford Geertz and Robert N. Bellah added to all of this monumental new data new data of their own, plus detailed anthropological and sociological theories concerning what both believers and unbelievers, aware of this new history of religion. All religions, both the most primitive and the most advanced, are a combination of two fundamental facts: a creation myth or myth of origin, and a pattern of ethical “do”s and “don’ts. Both of these arise directly out of the culture where the religion itself arises: its history, its language, its basic level of social structure (from hunter-gatherer, to farming, to urban literate, to industrial to informational societies such as ours). The myth of origin always presumes the natural world that all members see and understand—whether it is immensely sophisticated as are today’s religions, or very simple as with the hunter-gather tribes. Each culture in its own way know always the sun rises, the seasons follow each other without fail, spring comes and brings food, men and women come together produce offspring, and the sky with its combinations of planets and constellations are what the people have said they are since that people’s time immemorial. Today’s most sophisticated believers in both science and religion, such as Robert Taylor feel that the immense order, beauty and goodness of what science shows us propels many of us to faith, not necessarily in “God,” the Buddha, Brahman, or Allah, but in a great mysterious Ground of Being, or transcendent grounding and guiding divine element within the very cosmic process itself: the “process theology” of people like Charles Hartshorne and many others
A religious system which catches hold of the faith not only of its own people but soon spreads like wildfire around the planet—as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have done—do not necessarily replace the religions that were there before them. Rather usually they in one degree or another absorb segments of the older ones (as Christianity absorbed segments of Greco-Roman religions) or bind together with them, as Shinto and Buddhism in Japan have formed a religious rope of many strands that include deep elements of Taoism and Confucianism.
Some religions that early on formed close alliances with other systems such as the government and/or the military try to suppress all other religions as heretical, simply false or evil. This is what the Roman Catholic Church began to do in the ninth century, as it slowly formed the “Holy Roman Empire” where local princes governed hand in glove with local bishops and met at the top with a Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. Islam succeeded in a very different manner but with a similar result: low tolerance for other religions, none at all. Once the pope lost his own civil authority over the papal states in the nineteenth century he tried to make up for his loss of power by declaring himself infallible in terms of faith or morals—this in spite of the fact that the Church had changed radically in both areas: it ceased to allow for the morality of slavery and declared it immoral, and it ceased to deny Galileo’s declaration that our planet revolved around the sun and not the way the Genesis declared the cosmos to be. Only recently has it accepted the fact of human evolution from lower forms of life. But this is not a sign that Christianity is false so much as it is that Christianity, like all other religions evolves.
Jesus can still be believed to be the Son of God in spite of such normal evolution in Christian faith. Only a relatively few Christians today insist that the Bible is literally true; most admit that the creation story is a beautiful myth. Analogous changes have taken place in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. So why cannot all five of these religions and all the others as well, simply recognize the immense amount of good and truth that they actually teach and practice in common and come together in a union like the Kyoto Cosmos Club.
But people who find this of interest and would like to see how in practice, all religions do rely on faith, and each member of each religion is in fact a member of that particular religion because he or she actually does believe in faith (not because of any purely rational or empirical evidence that his faith is the most worthy of faith). But such a believer, being informed and aware, knows that others’ religious faiths, teach moral principles very similar to that believer’s own, and so can and will lead believers to being better human beings.
But how in fact do people, like members of the Kyoto Cosmos Club, who genuinely do embrace in faith almost every religion on the globe but in fact love to sit down together and eat and drink together while listening to some member present their own belief—which of course he or she is convinced is the nearest to the truth and the best?
The answer to that question will come from the Archive of Kyoto Cosmos Club’s three years and over twenty-five meetings. It is this Archive that we are coming close to finishing and it will be posted here on our blog site. We invite your comments on this effort. Is it stupid? Silly? Impossible? Or a major step towards peace in our ever-shrinking little planet? We will be sending our rough drafts of what we have been able to remember about the contents of each present’s ideas. We ask that these presenters, correct any errors, add any important elements left out, and send it back to us.
Finally—and very importantly—we ask all future presenters to give copies of his or her notes used, when the presentation is actually given, to the President Morris Augustine. He will, aftr writing up a piece for the Archives, sent it to the presenter for any additions or corrections.